You know, you spend the best years of your life arguing against the conservative notion that academia is full of navel-gazing, pointy-headed nudniks so out of touch with the real world that they suck up millions to pursue theses that anyone with an ounce of common sense could disprove in thirty seconds, and then something like this comes along.

In a story that smacks equally of grant-chasing and pure desperation, the Massachussets Institute of Technology -- providing dynamic proof of what happens when people trained in science attempt to apply objective standards to subjective fields of study -- has collaborated with a number of Hollywood big-shots to create something called the Center for Future Storytelling.  The premise behind this colossal boondoggle is pure crankery:  the movies, they say, are running out of stories.  Despite record profits at the box office, we're apparently running dry of narrative (an argument their spokespeople bolster with such fist-shaking geezer logic as blaming text messaging, <i>Guitar Hero</I> and cell phones). It's basically an updated version of the argument advanced in the 1970s that thanks to the proliferation of rock 'n' roll music, we were rapidly running out of melody, and within thirty years there would be no such thing as a new song.

The whole thing is patently absurd.  Narrative is a rhetorical device, not a natural resource; it can't be depleted like a coal mine.  We'll no more run out of stories than we'll run out of metaphors.  Even the act of defining different types of stories in order to prove that we're running out of them is a form of narrative.  Do we see an increasing number of shitty movies based on old TV shows?  Sure we do.  But it's not because there aren't any original stories; it's because Hollywood keeps financing hackwork.  And why does Hollywood keep financing hackwork?  Because people pay to see it.  Blaming some kind of imaginary depletion of the Narrative Zone on scriptwriters' inability to write decent endings ignores the fact that the whole thing is largely a business transaction, not a creative endeavor.  And even if the ridiculous claim were true -- which it isn't -- it ignores the fact that there are other ways to tell innovative stories on film than narrative, and Hollywood has shown precious little interest in them, either.

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We were looking forward to, in light of the Friday premiere of Teeth, bringing you a Take Five featuring nothing but movies featuring a vagina dentata.  Unfortunately, the search for five such films proved rather, well, unsettling.  So instead, you get this list, about taxicabs.  Why taxicabs?  Because this Friday also brings us the debut, in New York and L.A., of Taxi to the Dark Side, a new film from Alex Gibney, the prolific documentarian who also brought us Enron:  The Smartest Guys in the Room, No End in Sight, and Who Killed the Electric Car?.  His new effort focuses on the dismaying tale of an Afghani hack who was caught up — in error — in the U.S. anti-terrorist net, shedding yet another angle on the seemingly infinite human stories that can be found inside the confines of a taxi.  Taxicabs and Hollywood films came into their own at about the same time, and ever since then, some of the most memorable scenes in cinema have involved having someone drive someone else around and urban area for cash.  Taxi to the Dark Side, like most things involving the terror war, is likely to be a bummer, so here's some further taxicab confessions to get you from point A to point B.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Well, you knew we were going here, didn't you?  There's no more indelible vision of life behind the wheel of a cab than in Martin Scorsese's masterwork, one of the greatest screen treatments of alienation and unfocused rage ever captured.  From the scenes of Travis Bickle's yellow cab emerging from New York steam-clouds to the look on his face as a murderous passenger (played by Scorsese in full mile-a-minute mode) spells out the grim fate that awaits his cheating wife to the final, anticlimactically calm chit-chat he shares with his fellow hacks after he's somehow emerged a hero from a maniacal bloodbath, Taxi Driver perfectly captures the banality of brutality that lurks on the mean streets of New York and only emerges in the scary moments of privacy that we think we share with cabbies.  For an excellent companion piece to this essential American film, track down American Boy:  A Profile of Steven Prince, a documentary biography Scorsese filmed at the same time of the unstable, hilarious, deranged young man who plays the gun dealer in Taxi Driver.  

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